By Debasish Chowdhury
Ever since the advent of civilization, poets and philosophers have, as springs of wisdom, been steering man’s moral journey and servicing their emotional wants. Using their gifted talent, many of them have relentlessly strived to redraw the moral boundary and the cultural hegemony suffocative of natural human liberty. At times, they had even spearheaded revolutions seeking to overthrow the oppressive order. Right from the start, they have been humanity’s conscience keepers.
Driven and dictated by the high-end technology of the contemporary era in which the internet and social media consume a disproportionate quantum of daily time, the habit of reading at leisure has come down drastically. To enjoy reading poems while basking in the warmth of a morning Sun is out of vogue these days. Latest electronic gadgets now substitute printed books. Reading as an invitation to reflect has become a passé.
In this eastern part of our ancient land, however, the months of April/May still hold special significance. The combined impact of Assamese-Bengali New Year and Tagore birth anniversary celebrations at this time of the year revs up a flurry of cultural activities in the region and even beyond. For about a century now, Tagore, no matter whether one reads his works and appreciates his worldview or not, has remained a literary-cultural icon of Asian heritage. Despite the socio-political and cultural boundaries that keep the people of the region segregated from each other, Tagore’s stature has so far remained inviolable.
Born on May 07, 1861, Tagore, the youngest of fourteen siblings, eventually grew up as a poet par excellence, a composer, a novelist, a nationalist, a painter, an educationist and above all a great humanist who refused to be caged by narrow boundaries of bigotry. A versatile genius that he was, Tagore single-handedly claimed a unique place of honour in the world’s cultural and literary atlas for India, then a colonised land. To Will Durant, the noted American philosopher, Tagore was the “laureate of humanity.”
All over the world, about 270-280 million people today speak in Bengali. Belonging to the classical Indo-Aryan group of languages, Bengali is the seventh most spoken of languages. India accorded it the status of a classical language in 2024. Two hundred plus universities spread across continents have Bengali as primary academic discipline in their campuses. Two of the sovereign nations in the modern world have their national anthem composed in this language.
It’s fairly ancient origin notwithstanding (the Institute of Language Studies and Research, Kolkata (ILSR) in a 2024 research publication claimed that 51 Bengali words were found in a dictionary complied in 782 AD by Chinese poet Li-Yen: Ref: Wikipedia), Bengali came to worldly limelight mostly after Tagore’s collection of verses entitled Gitanjali made its first appearance in English under the title ”Song Offerings.” For this limited edition 1912 publication of the Indian society, London, Tagore was awarded the Nobel prize in November 1913 as its first Asian heritage recipient.
Released at a time when a restive socio-political setup in Europe that was then standing only few months away from what the history would eventually record as the First World War; ‘Song Offerings’ as also its composer Tagore appeared unto Europe as a dense mix of oriental wisdom and spiritualism representative of a serene tranquil which it was sorely missing at that moment. The craving for an exotic oriental mysticism coming right from the pen of an oriental polymath had appealed to the then Europe so intensely that it witnessed a sudden surge in translation of Tagore’s works in different European languages.
One of the most widely translated amongst the Bengali litterateurs, Tagore’s works had since been translated to English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, besides host of other European languages. The intense after impact of “Song offerings” inspired scores of illustrious personalities, to name a few, Czech Indologist Vincenc Lesný, French Nobel laureate André Gide, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and Bülent Ecevit, formerly Prime Minister, Turkey amongst others to undertake translation of Tagore’s works.
Literary titans like Chileans Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, Mexican Octavio Paz, Spaniards José Ortega Gasset, Zenobia Camprubí, and Juan Ramón Jiménez opting to undertake translation of Tagore’s work in their own respective languages on their own volition speaks eloquently of Tagore’s influence on Hispanic literature. During his 150th birth anniversary celebrations, Bengali department of Warsaw University, Poland published an Anthology of Tagore’s works which, unlike most of the other such works, was a direct translation from original Bengali to Polish.
Tagore’s literary creations, amongst other forms, also include some 3000 odd songs. Listeners across cultures experience a deep emotional resonance with his songs. Popularly referred to as Rabindra Sangeet, these are a unique blend of poetry and philosophy. Tagore’s lyric and tunes are delicate expressions of love, longing, devotion and nature steeped in spirituality. With remarkable subtlety, they can balm anguish, inspire hope and awaken introspection. Transcending spatial bounds and through generations that have followed, Tagore’s works do spur an anxiety of influence that inspires both a visceral churning and a wholehearted, passionate embrace.In his native Bengal, Tagore was adored as a bard of rare dexterity and also as an ardent nationalist. On the global stage, his western admirers like W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound presented Tagore as a profound fount of mystic oriental wisdom. In reality, Tagore was hardly an apt fit in either of these two frames. He, certainly, had abhorred the culture of oppressions and misrule perpetrated by the colonial rulers and keenly desired that his beloved India be freed from the clutches of the colonisers. But to him mere political freedom meant little. Until freed from the curse of repetitive dead habits, true freedom, felt Tagore, would remain illusory. And for that to happen, spread of proper education, he felt was a must. The aggressive nationalism of the occident pained him deeply and he did not want his India to fall in that trap. “The idea of the nation”, he lamented, “is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented.”
The garb of an oriental mystic of profound wisdom in which he was presented before the west, given Europe’s the then tense socio-political context, helped him to gain almost an instant reverential acceptance. But that acceptance hardly did any good to his image as a poet of the rare order. With flowing time, this fervour for exotic oriental mysticism, however, slowly waned out and, with it, Tagore’s image as poet also took a drastic drooping. By 1920 or so, even Yeats, who wrote the powerful introduction of the 1912 publication for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel prize, too turned into a Tagore critic and berated him for his self-translated works in English.
Tagore’s poems are replete with references to the universal divine reflective of his deep sense of spiritualism. But his spiritualism did in no way obfuscate his visionary sense of rationality. The latent but innate divisiveness typical of the organised religions as he had learned from the world history was a matter of deep worry for him. As a passionate humanitarian, he was convinced that it would do no good to India. Expressing his concern on this issue, he, in a letter written to Gandhi in 1933 clearly stated, “it is needless to say that I do not at all relish the idea of divinity being enclosed in a brick-and-mortar temple for the special purpose of exploitation by a particular group of people.”
Proper effective education, Tagore believed, could be the only antidote to the perceived threats. His Sri-Niketan model for education and the emphasis he accorded on community learning; the open air classroom and coeducational learning campus; his relentless struggle to build Viswa Bharti as a centre of universal knowledge steeped in humanitarian values, his abiding thrust on developing a “world-centric” curriculum that would support and improvise upon both oriental and occidental knowledge base all stand testimony to his endeavours in celebrating humanity in its totality while keeping the diversity that represents India intact.
In ‘Republic’ written some two millennia ago, Plato had a terse take on the poets. By holding poets guilty of mimesis, emotional manipulation and also for presenting lead characters in bad light, Plato conceded no space to them in his ideal state. Yet, poets stayed on through ages to help humanise man. Gurudev Rabindranath surely shall count amongst one of the most prominent of them. In this inept short tribute to our beloved Gurudev, we, even at the risk of being labelled as insolent, may perhaps thank our stars that, at least on the issue of poets, we are not on the same page with Plato.
(Debasish Chowdhury is presently the Controller of Examinations, Captain Williamson Sangma State University, Meghalaya.)
